While it quickly became clear that current and former NFL players can’t compete in flag football against experienced high-level flag-football players by simply showing up and playing, one basic fact was abundantly clear during the inaugural Fanatics Flag Football Classic.
Tom Brady can still grip it and rip it.
He continues to have a live arm. And he displayed surprising nimbleness before throwing his first touchdown pass of the day, stepping away from an effort to grab one of his flags before firing a touchdown pass to Stefon Diggs.
After the event, Brady retweeted the clip, with this message: “Gets you thinking.”
While there’s a big difference between playing limited-contact flag football on a one-off basis and enduring the week-in, week-out grind of full-contact tackle football, he looks like he could still play, even at 48. But it would be impossible for him to play for any team but the Raiders, and reporting that emerged after he struck a deal to buy a chunk of the Raiders made it clear that, even then, he’d need a vote of his fellow owners to allow him to do it.
Then again, why would they stop him from playing? They’ve already rolled over for his obvious conflict of interest from calling games for Fox and partially owning one of the franchises. He tends to get what he wants; if he really wanted to play, they’d likely let him.
The bigger issue is that the Raiders may soon have a new starting quarterback, if/when they use the first overall pick in the draft on Indiana quarterback Fernando Mendoza. Beyond that, Brady would give up (or at least press pause on) the remainder of his 10-year, $375 million deal with Fox.
Brady nevertheless said it. Even if he’s not serious about it, those three words — gets you thinking — will get people talking.
Which could be all he was trying to do.
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